Author: teachingbattleground

In most states of the U.S., clinical psychologists have to be licensed to practice on their own, and often hospitals or other agencies prefer to hire licensees, even though sometimes a practitioner could be covered by supervision from a licensed psychologist. In order to maintain this valuable licensure, clinical psychologists must do a certain amount of continuing professional education. Although a state psychology board can approve continuing education (CE) courses for their state’s licensees, the CE courses are most often identified by approval of the American Psychological Association…

Stop teaching calculus to high school students unless they’ve mastered foundational concepts and are ready to pass a college-level class, writes Jeffrey Forrester. As a Dickinson College math professor, he sees students who passed calculus in high school, then fail the college’s pre-calculus placement exam.

He cites research by Macalester’s David Bressoud, who found that introducing calculus to students with a shaky grasp of the fundamentals can be detrimental. Only those who passed an AP exam benefitted.

In 2015, 421,000 of the estimated 750,000 AP calculus students took an AP exam,…

Gifted classes in Miami schools include a mix of low-income and minority students, reports Claudia Rowe for the Seattle Times. That’s because the district uses a different standard for identifying disadvantaged children as “gifted.”

In Miami, middle-class and affluent kids need IQ scores of at least 130, while low-income children or those whose first language is not English can get in with scores 13 points lower — provided they rate highly in measures of creativity and academic achievement.

“Research shows that a child’s IQ is not static and can stretch with exposure to books, museums and…

“Rebecca Mead joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 1997. She has profiled many subjects, among them Lena Dunham, Christine Quinn, Santiago Calatrava, Nico Muhly, Slavoj Zizek, and Shaquille O’Neal….”

Reformers trying to merge traditional and progressive teaching approaches is a tough road to negotiate. In How Teachers Taught (1984) I laid out many examples of progressive efforts to do, for example, project-based teaching in the midst of bolted down desks during the 1930s. That effort to marry the two has continued to produce many hybrids. In this New Yorker article, I extracted an…

There is a new Best Evidence in Brief (they have a blog now too) and they share a new meta-analysis on a topic I once wrote a report about in Belgium: early childhood education. I remember finding mixed results in the different studies. And now:

A recent meta-analysis of almost 60 years’ worth of high-quality early childhood education (ECE) studies found that participating in ECE programs significantly reduced special education placement and grade retention, and lead to increased graduation rates.

The term “statute of limitations” is one that may be familiar to people who have tried to get recourse against those who have cheated or mistreated them. Such a statute is a law that time-limits lawsuits of some kinds. A person who seeks justice after a certain period has passed may find that he or she can no longer bring a suit for compensation for harms experienced.

It’s not unreasonable to have statutes of limitations for some problems. If too much time has passed, there may be no living witnesses to an event, and other evidence may have been corrupted or lost. Even the victim’s memories…